


Solstice Child

by Sholio



Category: Highlander: The Series
Genre: Community: hc_bingo, Families of Choice, Found Family, Gen, Homesickness, Winter, Winter Solstice
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-17
Updated: 2011-06-17
Packaged: 2017-10-20 12:12:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/212655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For hc_bingo square "Homesickness". Duncan doesn't think about what he's left behind. Except when he does. (Edit: Please also read the note at the beginning, since I did mess up something important in this story.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Solstice Child

**Author's Note:**

> Rather than editing the story itself, I'm editing to add an FYI/mea culpa about this story -- as a couple of readers on Dreamwidth have, to their credit, pointed out to me, my inadequate memory for canon details led to me completely screwing up some of Duncan's established canon (not to mention basically erasing an entire episode in Scottish history). [This comment](http://friendshipper.dreamwidth.org/351455.html?thread=6782431#cmt6782431) has a great deal more information on the time period than my inadequate research revealed. I do want to apologize for more than just messing up Duncan's religious identity in this story -- the more unforgivable part is that I erased the existence of an entire religious group in Scotland at the time; I'm very sorry and the fault is entirely my own.

He doesn't think about it often. Not consciously, at least. _You can't, can ye?_ The past is a foundation, a rock -- but let the rock grow over you and it becomes a tomb.

Rocks don't _grow_ , of course; in this time and place, that's common knowledge. In his own time, not so much. His long-ago wanderings in the hills of his homeland, after his people cast him out, once brought him upon a ring of standing stones, crooked as a boxer's broken teeth. _Oh, those are some women who danced on Sunday,_ the locals told him, _and were stricken and turned to stone._ Such things happened in those days. Lie down to sleep in the wrong place, said the old stories of his childhood, and ye might wake a thousand years later, the world having moved on ...

He wonders if the stones are still there, prey to tourists and photographers.

Duncan flips up the collar on his coat. Water beads on the wool. Amanda teased him once that he must like Seacouver because the weather reminds him of Scotland. She was joking, he thinks, but perhaps there's some truth in it too. This rain-drenched coast with its vivid greens, its wild crags and mountain lakes and lowering gray skies -- he liked it when he first saw it, when this city of steel, glass and concrete was little more than a cluster of log cabins and muddy horse-trails. And no matter how many times he leaves, he keeps coming back.

The drizzle is turning to snow, slushy gray flakes mixed with the sleet-cold rain. Duncan weaves his way to the taxi stand, through the crowd of holiday travelers. SUVs and family station wagons draw up to the curb and pull away with reunited families chattering happily inside. Duncan hails a cab and ducks into it.

"Where to?" the cabbie asks him, and Duncan gives him the address of the dojo, sinking into the taxi's slightly sticky seat. As they pull out of the airport loop road onto the freeway, he notices that it's dusk, the streetlights glimmering through wet flakes of snow. He wonders if it's worth asking the cabbie to stop at a grocery store along the way. The loft will be empty of fresh food, not to mention closed up and cold. But after a trans-Atlantic flight, followed by two plane changes in the U.S., all he wants to do is crash. He can order a pizza or open a can of soup; a far cry, he thinks with a slight grin, from having to hunt dinner in a cold, damp Scotland winter.

"So where you fly in from?" the cabbie asks over his shoulder.

"Vienna. Austria."

"No kidding? Watcha doing there?"

"Seeing a friend." Duncan smiles in memory -- watching Claudia Jardine perform with the Viennese Symphony Orchestra, wining and dining her before and after: a nice way to spend a few days. It's good to catch up with friends both old and new. The last time he'd been to Vienna, it hadn't even had streetcars yet. And this time, the city had been wearing her holiday finery, lit up for the season and dazzling in lights.

In his childhood, Christmas was not celebrated -- he didn't even know the holiday existed until traveling in Catholic lands, since the abolition of Christmas had been one of the Protestant Reformation's legacies, decades before his birth. Of course, he hadn't known any of that at the time. He knew only that they had quietly marked the winter solstice -- his birthday, as it happened -- and then celebrated the turn of the year with the festival of Hogmanay a week later. That's what he thinks of still, when he sees Christmas decorations: neither a religious holiday nor the modern secular version, but instead the roaring fires, the roasted hogs, the dancing and laughing of New Year's. The solstice had been a more quiet, reflective time, with a host of small superstitions to ensure luck in the coming season.

The solstice. That's today, isn't it? Duncan holds up his watch to the transitory flicker of a passing streetlight. Time zones make it tricky, and it's been almost twenty-four hours since he's slept -- but, yes, today's the winter solstice. The shortest day of the year. "Happy birthday," he murmurs to himself, and the memories catches him unawares: his mother, saving aside a little treat after supper for him; his father, giving him a new knife or taking him hunting in the winter-locked wood.

Though he'd been blissfully unaware that he was not the child of their blood, he'd never been given any cause to doubt that he was the child of their hearts. He might have been a foundling, but he was the only child his parents ever had, to comfort them in their old age.

 _Or so they thought ..._

"So you live here, or just in town for Christmas?" the cabbie asks him, and Duncan pulls himself back to the present with an effort.

"I live here part of the year, yeah. I travel a lot."

"Work?"

"Work and play," Duncan says with a smile.

Lately it's mostly been play -- well, that and the wandering urge that he's never managed to shake. He's been on the road, in fact, for the better part of a year. In the past decade or two, he hasn't had occasion to travel much -- first there had been those quiet, blissful years with Tessa, and then, it seemed, he'd been drawn into every Immortal feud and Challenge on two continents ...

But things have been quiet lately, and he's been having fun -- in the last eight months, he's wandered the Australian outback, climbed a mountain in Tibet, spent an alternately frustrating and delightful week with Amanda climbing all over ruins in Turkey (in search of a lost treasure of some sort, but all they found was a lot of sheep and a good case of sunburn). He even ran into Methos by pure coincidence -- at least, he thinks it was coincidence -- in an art gallery in Beijing.

Every so often Joe's been catching a jet and making an effort to catch up with him, but more often Duncan just sends him emails with updates on his latest adventures and occasionally pictures. He knows that Joe worries about him, and it's good to stay in touch with his friend, but he also likes to offer tidbits for his Chronicle so that Joe can continue doing what _he_ loves -- playing the blues and running his bar. Joe won't admit it, but he's getting too old to gallivant all over the world after a Scot inflicted with terminal wanderlust.

Actually, he's not even sure which continent Joe's on right now. Last time he'd heard from Joe was a brief long-distance conversation before he'd taken off for Vienna, and at that time Joe had still been in Paris. Duncan had mentioned that he was thinking about stopping by Seacouver for a little while, just to make sure the dojo hadn't burned down or been robbed in his absence, and Joe had said he was ready for a change of scenery as well, but no concrete plans had been nailed down on either end.

Duncan figures that he won't see Joe 'til after the holiday travel rush. He hopes Joe's at least tried to look up either Amy Thomas or his sister, rather than spending the darkest part of the winter alone in Paris. Or tracked down Methos at the very least and had a marathon drinking session. Actually ... that one's easier to imagine.

The chatty cab driver lets him out at the door of the dojo, and Duncan tips him $20, because he can afford it and he's worked a lot of jobs like that in his long lifetime. The driver grins and flicks him a cheerful salute. "Hey, buddy, you need a ride while you're here, you just call Checker Cab and ask for car 79, okay?"

"Sure, I'll remember it," Duncan says easily -- the T-bird is parked in long-term storage, but he might need a cab, why not?

It's snowing heavily now, collecting on the streets, softening the city's sharp edges. It used to snow like this in Glenfinnan every winter -- the world was just coming out of the Little Ice Age, after all. It rarely snows there anymore, at least as he understands the world's new weather patterns, and he knows from personal experience that it rarely does in Seacouver either, so he stands for a moment, head tilted back, enjoying the spinning pattern of the snowflakes. Then, his hair fresh-christened with snow, he ducks quickly into the hall of the dojo, letting himself in with keys that feel strange in his hands. The main part of the gym is bitterly cold and a musty, disused smell hangs in the air. He really needs to either find a new caretaker or rent out the space when he's gone. It isn't right that the building should be shut up for months at a time. And it would be good to have someone keep an eye on it when he's not here.

Duncan unlocks the elevator, already bracing himself for the cold empty space that he knows is above him. Coming home after a long absence is always a little hard, even after all the times he's done it. It'll take a few days to make the place feel lived-in again. And there's still the matter of figuring out what to feed himself tonight. He knows he left at least a few canned goods on the shelves, but after crossing eight time zones, he's not even sure if he feels up to sticking a bowl of soup into the microwave --

The Buzz hits him in the elevator. At least two Immortals. The first thing he did in the airport was to retrieve his katana from the baggage claim and settle it under his coat, and it's in his hand before he even thinks about it. He drops his carry-on bag behind him to get it out of the way, and light pours through the slats of the elevator's cage as he hauls up the door with his off hand --

"Told you it was him," Amanda says. She's sprawled on the couch with one shapely leg hooked over the back. "Put 'em away, boys. Though they're both _very_ nice swords, I must admit."

Methos tucks away his sword, looking completely unremorseful, and picks up his half-finished beer from the coffee table, where it's left a ring on the antique oak. "Pardon me if I'm a little less trusting than my young companion here."

"Why, thank you," Amanda says, looking flattered.

Duncan realizes he's staring, and puts away his sword by habit, still trying to figure out what the _hell_ is going on. The loft is warm and well-lit, and good cooking smells fill the air. "Did I send invitations and forget about it?" he manages at last.

Joe appears around the corner from the kitchen, wiping his hands on a dish towel. "You may as well have," he says, and he's _smirking_ , the bastard. "You're the one who told your Watcher where you were going, after all. It was just a matter of checking the flight reservations after that."

Duncan reaches dazedly for his bag, but Methos already has it. "Beer?" Methos says cheerfully, offering a cold one.

"Poor thing, he's frozen." Amanda hops up and pushes Duncan down onto the couch, beer and all, stealing his wet coat while she's at it. "Joe, I _told_ you we should have sent someone to pick him up at the airport."

"What, and spoil the surprise?"

Duncan is still trying to figure out whether this is a _good_ surprise or not. He's been rather looking forward to having a quiet evening, crashing early, and sleeping for about twelve hours. On the other hand, he can't just throw them out. "Guys ..."

"Frozen _and_ exhausted. Poor thing." Amanda takes his shoulders and pushes him flat on the couch, relieving him of his untouched beer and setting it on the coffee table.

"I assure you, MacLeod, we've been entertaining ourselves all day without you," Methos says dryly from somewhere else in the room. "Somehow I think we can manage without your scintillating company for a while. Joe, how long until that tantalizing meal is finished?"

"Half-hour? Forty-five minutes? Don't rush perfection. It might be faster if you'd chop these potatoes for me."

"Have I mentioned that when potatoes were first introduced into Europe, they were widely believed to be poisonous? I remember having an argument with Galileo --"

"Name-dropper." Amanda plunks a knitted afghan on top of Duncan and, after tugging it over his shoulders, glides off out of sight. "I hope no one expects me to cut up potatoes. These nails weren't cheap, you know."

"Don't worry," Methos says. "No one wants you near the kitchen anyway."

"Cold, man," Joe says. "True, but cold."

Duncan closes his eyes. The voices of Glenfinnan are still there, but quiet, blending into the cheerful argument going on in the kitchen: past and present, merging into a drifting, dreamlike blur.

"Happy birthday," Amanda whispers, bending to kiss Duncan on the ear.

He'd ask how in the world she knows it's his birthday -- she certainly never used to know -- except for a certain meddling Watcher in the kitchen, who has access to all his files ... which means Methos probably knows too. Damn it. But he's too warm and comfortable to feel like getting up to complain.

"Aww, he's asleep," Methos says. "Hey, Joe, know any good fraternity tricks to play on sleeping --"

"What the hell makes you think I was in a frat?"

"You're the closest thing we have to an expert, aren't you? The last time I was in university was five hundred years ago. And my adolescence was rather a long time ago. I expect all the pranks I know are long since outdated ..." He sounds wistful.

"'m not asleep," Duncan mutters. No one pays any attention to him, though he feels Amanda's fingers stroke through his hair.

"Joe, you're the unofficial bartender of the evening," Amanda says. "I think it's time to cut Methos off."

Joe snorts, and something in the kitchen sizzles. "Good luck with that. Are you volunteering for that duty?"

 _Time,_ Duncan thinks, as he drifts on the warm current of their voices, _is a river that flows one way_ \-- carrying him away from the land of his youth, carrying him to things unknown, unguessed. Twenty years ago, he had no idea that Tessa existed, or Richie. Ten years ago, he'd yet to discover the existence of the Watchers and Joe Dawson. Five years ago, he'd believed Methos to be nothing more than a legend ...

Time takes away. And time gives back. And takes away again. Sometimes it is worth it. Sometimes it's not. But always, there are havens like this, warm and safe in the middle of winter's storms. He is a solstice child, and that means he was born with the ability to weather the dark and the cold. But that doesn't mean he always wants to do it alone.

In the kitchen, Joe and Methos are having a cheerful, slightly drunken argument over mushrooms. Duncan knows that he's smiling because Amanda's thumb brushes the crease at the corner of his mouth. "Sleep," she whispers.

So he does.


End file.
